The bassoon
is an instrument that isn't a total stranger to jazz. Some have
doubled on bassoon at times, but even that isn't often. Others have
incorporated it into their compositions and arrangements. (See Michael
Rabinowitz tear it up as part of the Mingus Orchestra some time).
But it's reaching new places and new audiences with the arrival,
as it were, of Daniel Smith, a Brooklyn-born musician who reached
acclaim with the instrument in the classical world and is taking
it strongly into jazz.

He says, in
spite of the accolades he received as a classical musician, learning
the intricacies of jazz (an arduous task, he admits), he now enjoys
its challenges and its potential more than he does the classical
side.

For me,
he says, it is jazz and improvisation that I find much more
rewarding. There is simply no limit as to how high your skills can
take you with constant improvement via a lot of hard work and focus.
And you are always caught by surprise with new ideas which suddenly
pop out and catch you by surprise.

His playing
in jazz is still developing, he says, but progress can be seen in
the growing audiences for his gigs in the U.S. and Europe that are
enjoying the music of his jazz quartet, and can be measured in a
pair of recordings Bebop Bassoon (2006) and Swingin' Bassoon (2007)
on the Zah Zah label that, between them, cover a wide variety of
standards and styles, from Miles and Monk to Basie, Duke, Bird,
Dizzy and more. With him is his trio of Martin Bejerano on piano,
John Sullivan on bass and Ludwig Afonso on drums. The disks have
gotten some attention. Both are heard world-wide in many countries
stretching from North to South America, all of Europe, Asia and
as far as Moscow, he says.

His long-appreciated
classical work also goes strong. In 2005, composer/arranger Robert
Farnon dedicated his final composition to Smith. Romancing
the Phoenix is a three-movement bassoon concerto for solo
amplified bassoon with rhythm section and full symphony orchestra
in a jazz-oriented style crossed with symphonic. Warner Chappell
recently published the score and parts with Robert Farnon's dedication
to The American virtuoso Daniel Smith on the title page.

Robert
Farnon was a legendary figure in the world of arranging, orchestration
and composing. This bassoon concerto was his very last composition
before his untimely death in early 2005. His third symphony was
set to be premiered in Edmonton, Canada, and Edinburgh, Scotland,
that year. After these premieres, the plan was to follow with premieres
of the bassoon concerto, which Farnon himself was going to arrange.
His idea was to have a number of premieres worldwide including with
Andre Previn in Oslo, the Royal Philharmonic and the Proms in the
UK, orchestras in Canada, the USA, says Smith.

He says it appears
that a United Kingdom world premiere will be held in 2009, with
two orchestras combining forces ... there will be extensive publicity
worldwide about the premiere, followed by what we hope will be premieres
in the USA, Canada and throughout Europe. His performances
have included other firsts: The American West Coast premiere Gunther
Schuller's Concerto for Contrabassoon and Orchestra,
the world premiere of Steve Gray's Jazz Suite For Bassoon,
with the Welsh Chamber Orchestra and solo concerts at New York's
Lincoln Center and the Tivoli Concert Hall in Copenhagen, among
other prestigious dates.

The achievements
are significant. But perhaps even more so in light of the fact that
Smith's interest in music wasn't appreciated by his parents. It
was stifled. But his interest and talent still rose to the fore.
The persistence required to overcome that obstacle served him well.
It extended into a keen focus on learning music and various instruments
that have vaulted him into a successful and decorated career.

Being pushed
away from music caused him to actually forge toward it, he contends.
And hearing Benny Goodman as a teenager perhaps cinched his life's
direction.

There were pressures
put on me to conform and do something 'normal,' like being an accountant,
teacher, dentist, post office worker, whatever. I was a very different
sort of child and no one in my family knew what to make of me. My
mother was determined to stop me in my tracks when I took up clarinet
lessons and took me for an aptitude test, he says. I
did, in fact, score highest for accountancy, but the second highest
score was music. My mother felt she was now vindicated and said
to the examiner, So you do agree that he should be an accountant.'
To which the examiner said, 'Well no. He really should be a musician.'
Having had a discussion beforehand with him, he gave his professional
opinion to my mother with the 'wrong' answer of musicso I
was now damned for life.

Daniel
Smith was sixteen years old when he saw a New Year's Eve special
with the original Benny Goodman trio re-united (Goodman, Teddy Wilson
and Gene Krupa) on TV. I was totally mesmerized by the music
and felt a powerful urge there and then to learn the instrument
that Benny Goodman was playing. I went to a local music store and
said I wanted to learn how to play the trumpet. The owner asked
me why. I told him I saw a Mr. Goodman playing it on TV. The owner
asked: what did his trumpet look like? I said it was long and black,
and was then told it was a clarinet and not a trumpet. So much for
musical sophistication in my background.

He jumped into
music, still with opposition on the home front. My father
was horrified when I went to enroll at the Manhattan School of Music
and claimed that my sax teacherBill Sheiner, the same teacher
who taught Stan Getz one generation earlierwas deliberately
trying to ruin my life. One night when practicing in our basement,
my father physically dragged me upstairs to look at the TV. On the
screen was Elvis Presley jumping around while doing one of his hit
tunes. My father yelled, ?That's a real musician, he makes lots
of money.' So much for culture in my upbringing.

It is
interesting how much of the world's cultures value the arts while
here in the USA, so much of the population is devoted to making
money and materialism, Smith notes. I have lived in
Europe off and on for over twenty years and see very clearly the
different values in European societies in regard to having a career
in the arts. Hardly anyone thinks you are strange or asks how much
money you make or what do you really do for a living. It is an important
part of the values and priorities within many societies and artists
are well respected and often well compensated for their achievements.

Smith took up
extensive musical training on many instruments. He started clarinet
at sixteen, then added the saxophone a year later. He took up flute
lessons the next year, entered the Manhattan School of Music as
a clarinet major, switched in his second year to being a flute major,
eventually earning three degrees there. I studied each and
every instrument quite seriously and had some of the best teachers
on each of them, he says, including Bill Sheiner, Eddie Meyers
and Joe Allard on sax; Bill Sheiner and Leon Russianoff on clarinet;
Harold Bennett, John Wummer and Francis Blaisdell on flute; William
Polisi, Harold Goltzer, Sherman Walt, Lenny Hindell and Bernie Garfield
on bassoon; and Bert Bial and Richard Plaster on contrabassoon.

He even studied
the violin, piano and oboe for short periods. He honed skills in
all kinds of musical situations on various instruments, show bands
and Latin bands, concert bands, Broadway bands, symphony orchestras
and more. Once he took up the bassoon, he played a season with the
New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera Orchestras as a substitute
or extra player, two seasons with the New Jersey Symphony, The National
Ballet orchestra on tour, four seasons on fellowship with the National
Orchestral Society, a fellowship at Tanglewood, The New York Virtuosi
Chamber Symphony, and quite a few other orchestras as a free-lance
bassoonist or contrabassoonist.

But everything
came very late in life for me in regard to learning music and playing
various instruments, especially the bassoon, says Smith.

His teachers
and the classical repertoire he heard on recordings or played as
a member of various orchestras were his musical influences in the
classical realm. Then once I started to record, the bassoon
concertos and music of such as Vivaldi, Gordon Jacob, Elgar, Bach,
as well as pieces on bassoon adapted from the music of Scott Joplin,
Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Mozart, and countless others.
And last but not least, several well-known bassoon soloists from
various countries.

As for jazz,
a friend introduced him to those sounds during his high school days
in the Bronx. He heard the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie
on Dial and other labels. He went to hear jazz at Birdland and other
clubs, using a fake draft card to get in.

I was
first in line at Birdland, and for $1.80, purchased a ticket and
sat in the peanut gallery right next to the piano. There I heard
so many of the jazz greats. Count Basie's band many times, Stan
Getz, Duke Ellington, Bud Powell, Dinah Washington, Dizzy Gillespie,
Miles Davis, Cannonball, Coltrane, Zoot Sims, Gerry Mulligan and
so many others. This was just about the time I was learning the
clarinet, so from my teens onwards, I was not a stranger to jazz,
he says.

Daniel
Smith's
early jazz idols included Getz, Parker, Sonny Rollins, Clifford
Brown, Miles, the Basie, Ellington, Woody Herman and other bands,
Lee Morgan, Cannonball Adderley and Mulligan. Even when he began
to focus on an instrument not associated with jazz, he was undeterred.

For whatever
reason, once I got the 'bug,' I never doubted I could do it,
says Smith. But I instinctively knew from the start it would
not be easy and with no short cuts, given the difficulties of the
bassoon. All my already achieved skills as a virtuoso in classical
music were of no help whatsoever when I started to plunge into jazz
and improvising. It was only after three or four years of mastering
all the jazz scales and chords and learning in stages how to improvise
that the technique I already had from before clicked in and joined
up with my newly learned jazz skills.

Smith puts Charlie
Parker on par with Mozart's musical genius. Talent and genius
are often attained via sheer hard work and dedication, and the same
jazz talent might very well have been a fine composer of classical
music and vice versa, he says. Which genre is more difficult?
Smith doesn't hesitate.

He says it is
several times more difficult to pull off convincing jazz.
For instance, the saxophone jumps the octave with a single key and
the fingerings mostly stay the same, except for the very top and
bottom notes. The clarinet has a register key which makes a jump
of a twelfthagain the fingerings remain mostly the same other
than being different pitches. With the flute, you jump the octave
with the use of the lip while using many of the same fingerings.

The bassoon
is a bit more than a three octave instrument. Once you move upward
from the middle-low register, you have multiple problems to deal
with. This includes completely different fingerings for many notes
in the upper registers, extreme care with diaphragm and breath control
to get the higher pitches in tune and passages which require extreme
dexterity. Examples range from many of the Vivaldi bassoon concertos,
up-tempo pieces of Charlie Parker and Dizzy, and the release of
Thelonious Monk's 'Well You Needn't' with its fast-moving, descending
chromatic seventh chords. Not for the faint hearted.

Smith's years
of study have paid off. But there's more to learn; he best yet to
come.

I just
did a concert in England at the Thame Concert Jazz Club with the
Jonathan Gee trio filling out my 'Bassoon and Beyond' jazz quartet
with wonderful piano, bass and drum accompaniment, he says
in December of 2007. This trio performed many times at Ronnie
Scotts in London with the likes of Joe Lovano and Benny Golson,
so it was important that I do my best with them. I came well-prepared
and was able to do the entire concert from memory with no music
stand on stage and never missed a note. My solos were light years
beyond my jazz album solos and the evening just got better and better.
I attribute this to a lot of hard work, and by leaving nothing to
chance in preparing for this concert. The lesson here is that one
can attain higher and higher levels in jazz and continually improving
with hard work and dedication.

As for
the actual art of improvising, I find it fascinating and a constant
source of amazement to me. I really don't have a clue as to how
my fingers go down on the correct keys to execute a musical idea
which I am hearing in my head many measures before actually playing
it, Smith says. I know that every time I pick up the
instrument, something different and better will come out than the
previous day and I can count on this happening whether practicing
or on stage at a live performance.

His continued
wok in jazz appears to take on excitement for this well-studied,
accomplished instrumentalist on the cusp of coming into his own.

There
is never a day when I pick up the bassoon and fail to improvise
better than the previous day. In fact, were I to redo my jazz albums
today, you would hear my improvised solos played on a much higher
level. But, as every musician knows, one can only do their very
best at any given time, and if the process of improving is a constant
quest, then you would expect to be doing improvisations vastly improved,
different, and more original as time goes by. As for the public
awareness of jazz bassoon, I would bet that in the next year or
two it will be accepted widely and viewed as yet another instrument
which has a future and a following in jazz, he says.

The following
is an edited exchange between Smith and All About Jazz on his jazz
recordings, his feelings about the bassoon, which is known for its
warm, dark timbre, and other musical topics.

All About Jazz:
How did you go about selecting tunes for Bebop Bassoon and The Swingin'
Bassoon? Was it favorite songs, or a type of feeling you wanted
to express? It almost seems that you guys had so much material,
and fun, that you extended it into two discs.

All of
a sudden, a sort of miracle happened! Ideas started to flow and
my fingers simply executed what I was hearing in my head

Daniel Smith:
It was a somewhat mutual effort. I first met alone with pianist
Martin Bejerano. We ran through quite a few pieces and saw which
ones seemed to work best. Next came three days of rehearsals at
a studio with the full quartet. Again, we discarded pieces which
did not work and focused on those that seemed to come together nicely.
By the time we arrived at the recording studio, we had twenty-one
pieces in all and started to tape them over a period of three days.
Halfway through the recording sessions, I was starting to feel a
bit insecure about the tapings and suggested we abandon ten or so
of the pieces and concentrate on just enough for one album. Martin
Bejerano spoke to me and urged me to keep with the original plan
and record everything we had prepared and go for two albums from
the sessions. Fortunately, I took his [suggestion]. And yes, it
was fun recording this music and quite challenging.

AAJ: How
do you feel about the band and how they jelled and sounded with
you?

DS: Martin Bejerano
and John Sullivan were members of Roy Haynes' band and Ludwig Afonso
went on the road with Spyro Gyra after we did the sessions, so I
was indeed in some very good company. Besides being a great jazz
pianist, Martin was able to help me put together interesting and
appealing approaches to each musical selection. John Sullivan was
a Rock of Gibraltar with his solid bass lines and Ludwig Afonso
a very creative and tasteful drummer. I have had discussions already
with Martin about future jazz projects and would like to use these
same players for future albums.

AAJ: What led
to the bassoon?

DS: It was a
period late in the Vietnam war era and the draft was still in effect.
I had just graduated Columbia University and was newly married.
Harold Bennett, my flute teacher at the time, informed me that there
would soon be a flute/piccolo opening in the West Point Band where
a former student of his was about to finish his military service
in the Army's special services and would keep me out of Vietnam
with a three-year enlistment. I auditioned and was appointed solo
piccolo and flute with the band.

While in the
military, my wife became pregnant and we had our first child. I
was concerned that upon being discharged from the military, I would
need to make a living to support my family. The idea thus came to
me of learning the bassoon so as to be a doubler, which would enable
me to get into Broadway show bands and studio work after returning
to civilian life. And so I started lessons at age twenty-five with
one of the band's bassoonists, Christopher Weait. One thing led
to another, but it would still be some years before I started to
work my way toward being a soloist on the instrument.

AAJ: What is
it about the instrument that attracted you, still attracts you?

DS: I hoped
it would enable me to make a living doing studio and show work.
Then came the sheer challenge of playing the instrument. The bassoon
is one of those instruments, along the violin, cello and others,
that are considered ten-year instruments, meaning roughly this length
of time to become a complete master or virtuoso. I really enjoyed
the step-by-step progress I was making and found it much more rewarding
than any of the other instruments I had mastered.

AAJ: How important
is the sound you get and how do you strive for that?

DS: Apparently
quite important from all the reviews and feedback I have received
over the years. First with classical and crossover recordings and
performances, and now in an even bigger and more important way with
jazz bassoon. I would imagine that having played the flute, clarinet,
saxophone, and perhaps a bit of violin, I combined together everything.
I incorporate various sound concepts from all these other instruments
and added them to my traditional bassoon conservatory/classical
training.

I don't have
a clue why my sound is what it is. Nearly all the reviews for my
recordings, whether classical, jazz, or crossover, are quite outstanding,
and for the negative remaining, they simply do not like what I dowhether
classical or jazz. As for live performances, I always get wonderful
audience reaction and write-ups, so I must be doing something right.

AAJ: Was it
easier for acceptance of the bassoon in the classical world?

DS: Probably,
yes. I stepped into the role of a classical bassoon soloist in stages,
first doing some concertos with semi-professional orchestras, then
onto more established ones, concertos with orchestras in Europe,
then making my first two concerto albums using members of the New
York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera orchestras, then a big
leap upward with five concerto albums with the English Chamber Orchestra,
three others with the Zagreb Soloists, crossover albums with the
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and The Caraveggio Ensemble, a recital
album with Roger Vignoles, an album of music for Bassoon and String
Quartet with England's Coull Quartet, etc.

So by the time
I got into jazz, all this was already in place and I guess you could
say I was considered a virtuoso by many. Several of my classical
albums have won awards along the way. My five-CD set of the complete
Vivaldi bassoon concertos is a best seller with the Musical Heritage
Society and won an award as Best Concerto Album of the Year, my
two crossover albums were a first in this area, and there were several
other pioneering achievements on the instrument before moving on
to jazz albums.

AAJ: What
kind of reactions did you get when you started carrying it over
into jazz?

DS: The main
reason I got into jazz was due to a piece of music entitled Jazz
Suite for Bassoon and Orchestra, written for me by the English
composer and pianist Steve Gray, then a member of the pop-rock group
Sky, led by guitarist John Williams. Steve included improvisation
spots in the movements, which I worked up and then wrote out. But
by doing this, I had seriously caught the jazz bug and decided then
and there that I wanted to do it right from that point on. I proceeded
to set myself a long-range goal to master the idiom of improvisation
and jazz on the bassoon. It was not easy at first, but I just kept
plugging away. I worked hard over the next years with many hours
of concentrated practice to learn and master this very difficult
craft on an instrument several times harder than saxophone and many
other instruments.

I learned all
the jazz scales and chords in every key and from bottom to top of
the bassoon while using a metronome to increase the speeds gradually.
Next came multiple patterns using these scales and chords. I then
purchased some Jamey Aebersold CDs and learned to place the scales
and chords in the right places above the piano, bass and drums,
and to learn to hear the chord quality and where the progressions
were going.

Then came primitive
attempts at improvising. They probably sounded awful and I invited
people to hear what I was doing while playing along with the Aebersold
tracks. Everyone was very polite and supportive saying that I sounded
great, but I seriously doubt they were being truthful. Due to the
extreme strain of trying to force musical ideas using very different
sort of scales, chords along with a technique quite different from
classical music, my right arm started to get very sore and stiff.
I eventually reached the point of believing my arm would be permanently
damaged from all this.

All of a sudden,
a sort of miracle happened! Ideas started to flow and my fingers
simply executed what I was hearing in my head. The problem with
my arm went away and never came back, while my playing of jazz got
easier and smoother as time went by. The next step was to start
performing live in a jazz quartet setting at private parties, jazz
clubs, music clubs, music festivals, etc. These were mostly in the
UK, where I was living at the time. By trial and error, I started
to understand what was required to play convincing jazz on the bassoon
and went through many learning plateaus and various shifts upward
in regard to reaching higher and more creative levels of improvising...and
feeling more and more confident along the way.

As for acceptance
of the instrument playing jazz, this happened immediately with audiences
who heard me in live settings. However, early on, a well-known British
bassoonist who knew me, said that it would be dangerous for
my career if I played jazz in the UK. In hindsight, I now
understand what he was hinting at. To this very day, there are classically
trained bassoonists who focus on the accuracy of pitches and zero
in on my bending of notes when I play jazz. I do this on purpose
as any jazz saxophonist would do, to capture the essence of a phrase
within a melody or an improvised solo, otherwise the music would
be stiff, formal, and not swing. For better or worse, I suspect
such players may never get it. If I did not do this while performing
jazz on the bassoon, and as Duke Ellington said, It don't
mean a thing if it ain't got that swing, the music would be
correct and perfectly in tune, but would come across
as dull and uninteresting.

AAJ: What
do you like about improvisation, that is stressed more in jazz?
What attracts you to jazz?

DS: When I do
a recital for instance, I might be playing a particular piece by
Edward Elgar or Mozart which I have performed dozens and dozens
of times over the years. How much more can I add on to the music?
As Wynton Marsalis once said: in classical music you are a re-creator,
in jazz you are a creator. I recorded several albums in London with
the English Chamber Orchestra around the same time Marsalis was
recording his classical albums with the same orchestra. I saw how
he made the jump back and forth from classical to jazz and vice
versa, so I knew the field was wide open for someone to do this
on bassoon.

As for the actual
art of improvising, I find it fascinating and a constant source
of amazement to me. I really don't have a clue as to how my fingers
go down on the correct keys to execute a musical idea which I am
hearing in my head many measures before actually playing it. I am
currently in touch with Oliver Sacks who is publicizing his new
book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf, 2007). I
hope to discuss with him how the mind works in the art of improvising.
Maybe I will understand how this happens. Maybe not. Meanwhile,
I know that every time I pick up the instrument, something different
and better will come out than the previous day and I can count on
this happening whether practicing or on stage at a live performance.

[According to
Smith, Sacks plans to start work on a follow-up book with his discussions
with the author included.]

AAJ: Are there
still some prejudices about the instrument in jazz? Or some snickers
when you tell people?

DS: Very little
if any at all. Other than those classically trained bassoonists
who basically don't get it and are shocked by the bending and sliding
of pitches within jazz phrases, everyone has gone for it in a very
big waycritics, jazz disc jockeys and audiences everywhere.
The only reference to a snicker actually was in a recent
review of my last jazz album, The Swingin' Bassoon. The reviewer
did anticipate it would be something strange to hear and made a
remark that at first he thought he read The Swingin' Baboon
on the CD title. He then went on to praise the album in the highest
terms with some wonderful comments about my playing and the ensemble.

AAJ: How do
you feel it's been accepted so far, with your proliferation of recordings
and appearances?

DS: Beyond my
wildest dreams. Killer Joe, from Bebop Bassoon, is now
the sixth ranked all-time download with All About Jazz and had over
10,000 downloads in 2006 alone. Both this album and The Swingin'
Bassoon are heard world-wide in many countries stretching from North
to South America, all of Europe, Asia and as far as Moscow. Many
of these countries are where I have agents representing me and where
we expect many engagements at festivals, jazz clubs and concert
series from 2008 onwards. Quite a few are now being arranged and
with further queries coming in from presenters about having me on
their series.

AAJ: Do
you see yourself as a pioneer on the instrument?

DS: I would
suppose so. I seem to be all over the Internet, heard on In-flight
with many airlines, on classical and jazz radio, there are quite
a few interviews and articles on my career in the media, and I am
frequently contacted by bassoonists from many countries who know
of me. It would be naive to think that everyone would admire or
like what I do ... I just keep trying to improve my skills and if
someone does not like what I am doing, that's fine with me, everyone
is entitled to their opinion.

AAJ: How do
you go from classical to jazz...back and forth...with such apparent
ease?

DS: I have to
wear two hats, as the expression goes. This takes place not only
in the way I change styles and approaches in both genres, but also
in concerts where I have to perform and cover both classical and
jazz. The first half of these split classical/jazz concerts features
acoustical bassoon with piano in a recital format. After the interval,
I am joined on stage by a jazz rhythm section of piano, bass and
drums. Sometimes I have a pianist who can cover both classical to
jazz, other times I use two different pianistsa classical
accompanist for the first half and then a jazz trio with its own
pianist for the second half. I also switch from acoustical bassoon
for the classical part to an amplified bassoon for the jazz segment.
Keeps you on your toes.

AAJ: Is there
a different mind set for each?

DS: Yes, and
in the case of jazz, throwing all caution to the wind. If you bend
notes to get an effect in a jazz phrase, the purists might say you
are out of tune. The jazz listener or critic might say the oppositethat
you did not bend the notes enough in comparison to what a sax player
does. By trial and error and instinct, you eventually know just
how much you want to bend a pitch, throw in a glissando, maybe make
a pitch move up or down as you hold it to get an effect, as well
as many other things you discover along the way to make a particular
jazz tune come to life on the bassoon.

AAJ: Do you
have a rigorous practice regimen, or are you playing so much that
it's not always necessary?

DS: When I am
preparing for a specific jazz performance, I practice a solid two-and-a-half
to three hours each and every day leading up to the event. When
there is nothing coming up on the horizon insofar as a jazz performance,
I then need to devote a lot of time working on career matters which
need to be attended to as things move forward. This includes preparing
various new items in print with my art design person, upgrading
my website with my webmaster, answering correspondence, sending
to my various agents in many countries current news, reviews and
information to help their promotion. And of course the behind- the-scenes
work loosely known as politics to help achieve recording
deals, bookings, publicity, etc.

It now looks
like that by mid-2008, my efforts and those of my various agents
will reach a state of automatic pilot, whereby they mainly will
be dealing with enquires to book me and working up contracts for
confirmed engagements. And then hopefully my responsibility would
just be to keep a daily practice routine and keep moving upward
with my jazz skills and leave much of this other work to others.

AAJ: Are you
still faced with convincing people that the bassoon and your bands
are not gimmicky, but serious music that people will
enjoy?

DS: Once I get
onto a stage, and from the first notes, there is no doubt in anyone's
mind in the audience that this is real jazz they are hearing and
nothing gimmicky. And yes, they do enjoy it a lot as you can see
from the reviews on my website.

AAJ: What
is the public reaction at gigs, to seeing this instrument that may
be different to them, but then they see it played so well?

DS: Some years
ago, after receiving a not-so-great review for one of my classical
recitals, I felt a bit down afterwards. My accompanist, Jonathan
Still, was friends with a well-known London ballet-master. He mentioned
to this ballet master the negative comments in the review. The ballet
master then replied, Just remember, the eyes never lie
and wanted to know how the audience reacted to the performance.
He was told that from the stage, we had seen nothing but smiling
faces, smiling eyes, lots of applause, and a well-received encore
piece, to which the ballet master said he was sure we did a fine
performance since the eyes never lie.

I now know,
from experience, that the audience is always on target and the occasional
negative comment or review is to be taken with a grain of salt,
with classical, and now in my jazz concerts. The eyes never lie,
and I know with certainty when an audience appreciated and enjoyed
a particular performance and that I gave them my very best.

AAJ: How are
things proceeding on the jazz front?

DS: I am very
optimistic for many reasons. My own playing, which is continually
getting better on a daily basis, the effectiveness of the various
agents representing me worldwide, and last but not least, the appeal
for listeners and audiences coupled with media angles for something
new insofar as jazz bassoon. So far it has all been extremely positive
and I am confident it will only keep expanding and moving in a very
good direction.

AAJ: What about
future projects?

DS: There will
be quite a few. I already mentioned a recent meeting with pianist
Martin Bejerano in which we discussed specific repertoire and titles
for future jazz albums. This would include albums with such titles
as Blue Bassoon, a two-volume set of blues pieces in many styles;
Big Band Bassoon, an album of musical selections associated with
many of the great swing bands; Bassoon Goes Latin, bossa novas,
salsa, etc., and Bassoon and Beyond, an album with more progressive
pieces on it.